About the Author

John Holland

John Holland is an experienced developer and architect who has been designing and developing database applications since 1987 and Internet development since 1995. Expertise surrounding application design and development focuses on technologies C#, ASP.NET, and PHP.

Angular State/Country Directive

John Holland Angular, JavaScript, Single-Page Application Leave a Comment

A Lesson In ROI: Scratch vs. Adapt Existing Angular Code

On a recent client project, I needed to develop an Angular front-end for a form that included address information. As part of the address information, there were State and Country fields. I knew I needed to make these select lists, because from a UX perspective, it would be crazy to leave them as regular old text inputs. I knew I wanted to create directives to implement these select lists. I also knew I probably wasn’t the first developer to ever want to do this.

In this blog, I talk about a decision that all developers face every day: how to solve programming problems in the best way with the best use of time. The scenario we’ll talk about shows the use of Angular directives for creating select lists for country and state. In doing so, it provides a good understanding of Angular directives as one possible way they can help make Angular development great.

Using Toastr With SignalR

John Holland .NET, ASP.NET, Development Technologies, Tutorial 1 Comment

When you submit data to the server within a Single-Page Application (SPA), you are not performing the usual form post of data that would generate a new page load. Rather, you send the data using AJAX and are able to parse the response returned by the API using JavaScript and can act accordingly. In the past, this would most likely come in the form of an alert or populating a div with the appropriate message. This approach did what I needed it to do, essentially notifying the user of success or failure and allowing them to move on with their work.

Enter Toastr. Now I can have a non-blocking, consistent way in which to display these messages to the user, that are styled respective to the type of message it is. This is where the story gets interesting. So with this easy to use, non-blocking, consistent way of displaying messages, you can pair it up with SignalR and provide that same messaging from the server-side.

In this blog, we will demonstrate the use of the Toastr messaging library and how, when you couple it with SignalR, it can provide you with an easy-to-use, consistent messaging alternative.

SignalR Server-Side Timer

John Holland .NET, ASP.NET, Development Technologies Leave a Comment

Attention: The following article was published over 9 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. Please keep that in mind as you read the post.Recently, I had the fairly simple task of using SignalR to push out to logged-in users the dreaded impending “Site Maintenance” message. The Product Owners wanted to keep it simple and straightforward, since …

Real-Time Website Data Using SignalR

John Holland .NET, ASP.NET, Databases, Development Technologies 2 Comments

Attention: The following article was published over 10 years ago, and the information provided may be aged or outdated. Please keep that in mind as you read the post.When I was tasked with using SignalR to implement the real-time updating of data on a project I was working on, I was excited. Namely because it is a newer technology and …